Olga Bubich

“My grandmother always said that we don't know how to think about the future; we must turn to the past. I started to wonder about the story of my life, of how I was born, of how things were before I was there. I tried to check back on details I might have got confused, too young to remember them correctly. It was a story I had heard countless times before; the story of a fixed reality in which I had gradually found my part, however complicated. This time it was different. This time, there were no fixed points, everything had to be remade from scratch. The story of my life was not the story of the events that had occurred in any particular period but the story of searching for the right questions, the questions I had never thought to ask.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“Письмо раздваивает объекты собственного исследования. Создавая параллельную реальность текста, мы понемногу теряем интерес к реальности, отходим от нее все дальше. Чудесный простор различия - добавочная стоимость по отношению к миру. Эта книга производит не только новую историю, не только новую тебя - но и новую меня.”
― Дарья Трайден, Грибные места

“I wasn't Christian enough.
I wasn't Hindu enough.
I wasn't communist enough.
I wasn't enough.

It came as a relief. It liberated me and set me walking. For years after that I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I travelled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-writer,

Free woman, Free writing. Like Mother Mary taught me.

I hadn't just avoided the gilded cage. I had blown it to smthereens.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“I cleaned up in the morning - brief, concise, withour any of the usual strategies and requesting no response. I thought to myself that I had just crossed the "Nuit du Walpurgis classique", even thought I don't know the exact meaning of this title of a poem by Verlaine, the rest of which I have forgotten.

(To give a title to the moments of one's life, the way one does at school for literary passages, is perhaps a way to master them?)”
― Annie Ernaux, The Possession